The Chef mailing list moved to a Discourse forum a little while back, which makes asking questions and having discussions a pleasure (I 💜 Discourse).

We’ve been having a bunch of problems resolving Berkshelf and chef-client dependencies, so I decided to ask a question. The helpful martinb3 pointed me to Berkshelf master. It turns out, Berkshelf is working on a new dependency resolution system in the solve gem. This new resolver is also written in pure Ruby, which means no pesky C extensions via gecode.